1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a gaming machine and more specifically, to a gaming machine in which the display mode of a character displayed on a gaming screen or demo screen changes in response to a player making contact with the character.
2. Description of the Related Art
In recent years gaming machines installed in game halls or store have been mainly machines that respond to input from a touch panel. A touch panel responsive gaming machine could be like the following.
(1). A gaming machine such as that disclosed in Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 2004-208894, in which a player operates a controller to define an instruction input region in a part of the character, such as the head or shoulders, displayed on the screen and coordinates movement control processes of the character with the instruction input region, thereby specifying the instruction input region. After this specification operation, the movements of the player character are controlled via a contact screen such that the hands or other parts of the player character as if corresponding to the alter ego of the player, contact the part of the character thus specified. When the part contacted by the player character is the part defined as the instruction input region the corresponding action control process is executed on the process execution screen and the player character performs the instructed action.
(2). A gaming system such as that disclosed in Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 2004-73682 in which a plurality of action icons for facilitating selection of the action performed by a player character are displayed on a touch panel type display part, and a plurality of other player character images are displayed, the input selection for actions and the input selection for targets being performed via touch input to action icons and touch input to other player characters.
Conventional touch panel responsive gaming machines also include gaming machines in which a character is displayed during the game and by touching this character image control is performed such that the character appears to move toward the player. The responses of the character when the touch panel is touched are uniform however, and it is only possible for a player to continually repeat touching the touch panel deriving the same response from the character, which may cause the player to become bored.
Moreover, while conventional gaming machines employ performance scenes that make a character perform a variety of actions during a game, normally, a player is only able to watch these various performance scenes on the screen and is not able to participate, therefore inviting a feeling of insufficiency.
Further, in the case of a conventional touch panel responsive gaming machine, even though the gaming machine may be displayed as touch panel responsive the only way for a player to really find out if the game is in fact touch panel responsive is to actually use the gaming machine. For a player who is using the machine for the first time it may be difficult to decide whether the machine really is touch panel responsive before actually starting the game.
Again, a player who has not used a touch panel game and who does not know how to operate the touch panel becomes confused not knowing how to operate once the game starts as they suddenly start using the touch panel. Sometimes players just stop using the game.